Show HN: Cocktail search written in Python using scrapy and sphinx | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Cocktail search written in Python using scrapy and sphinx

cocktails.p24dev.de

29 pointswallunit21 comments

Nice, but there should be

1. Some stemming/normalizing such that "créme" and "creme" (as in, say, creme de menthe) are not two distinct result sets. (To your credit, whisky/whiskey appear normalized)

2. A list of sources available apart from mouse-scrubbing the results. Any reason Esquire (considered borderline definitive by certain cocktail snobs) isn't in there?

Wishlist:

-A way to make a search for "brandy" return anything containing "cognac" or "calvados," but not vice versa. Ditto for whisky vs scotch/rye/bourbon.

-Ability to exclude certain sources from all searches

Actually the english stemmer from libstemmer/snowball is already used. Additionally there is a wordforms list, that at the moment maps only whisky to whiskey. ;) Feel free to do a pull request, if you know other words that must be normalized. I have also just added an advanced charset_table, mapping amongst others "é" to "e". So when you search now for "créme", you get the same recipes as for "creme".

At the moment I only crawl Wikipedia, liquor.com and seriouseats.com for cocktail recipes. But thanks for mentioning Esquire. I didn't knew that website yet. Maybe I will crawl them as well in the future.

One direction mapping of words is unfortunately not possible with sphinx. However I could expand "brandy" to "brandy OR cognac OR calvados", just before I run the query. I will consider that approach.

I really like this! I recently started making simple cocktails, and I am certainly going to use this.

Things I'd like to see: * I prefer milliliters over oz (I didn't even know what it was before I googled it, since I live in Europe), please make this an option * Some form of autocomplete, preferably with a dropdown list (but make sure it doesn't obstruct the next textbox). There's a jquery plugin that does dropdown autocomplete well. * Pressing enter should make the next textbox active (seems more intuitive than tab in this case) * It would be nice if the ingredients in the ingredient list below a cocktail were clickable. Clicking them should add them in the list of selected ingredients and update the cocktails visible.

On things to fix:

While I appreciate the use of history, I promise you I don't need to hold my position on the page for every single letter I type in the search box: http://screencast.com/t/1qFwxlz5

I ended up with a history entry for "search results for 'c'", "search results for 'co'", "search results for 'cog'", etc.

Maybe trim this down to only firing after 10s on inactivity in a text input or use onblur? I'm not too sure what the answer is but it (page history) definitely loses any usefulness when architected in this manner.

The primary reason why I am using the history API, is that you can bookmark and send links to a specific search. However I agree that when you are actually using the history, it becomes annoying to have any search that was executed while you were typing in your history.

However when updating the history only every 10s, you might have to wait until you can copy the link to your search from the address bar. And if you aren't typing fast enough there still can be incomplete searches in your history.

Using onblur would be better. But what would you think about, updating the history as soon, as the cursor is moved? I think I like that idea pretty much.

I think http://caniuse.com handles this situation quite well (try searching for something). Notice the short delay between a keypress and the URL updating.

They reset the timout everytime you type another letter. That approach seems to work quite well, unless you are a very slow typer.

However I have just implemented another approach to deal with that issue. Now, the history is updated either when the current field lost focus or when you move the mouse, after you entered something. Please try it out and let me know what you think.

Thank you very much for the feedback. However the problem is, that the ingredients as imported from the websites I crawl aren't in any structured format. I didn't found a reliable way to extract the amount and the actual name of each ingredient. And without that, auto-completion and converting amounts is impossible to do. However if somebody is smarter than me, suggestions (and pull requests) are welcome. :)

This is great. I would really love to see this tool with a curated list of recipes. The recipes from scraping are hit or miss. Please message me if you want to chat about it, maybe I can help.

I would also have a couple suggestions for improvement. (1) include the recipe for how to make the cocktail, as opposed to simply the ingredients. This can make a big difference in the result. (2) include an AND function for the ingredients search (eg. a search for pisco AND lime, I didn't see that this exists currently).

I'm not sure if either approach would improve the results.

Searching the introductions in additions to the list of ingredients, will rank recipes higher, when the ingredients you were searching for, occur more often in the instructions. But a recipe isn't necessarily more relevant, because of its instructions are more verbose.

I'm not sure if an AND function would add much benefit. Yes, at the moment only one of the given ingredients must be part of the cocktail, in order that it appears in the search result. But the search results are also sorted by relevance, so that cocktails that contain more of the searched ingredients are ranked higher, than cocktails that contain fewer of the searched ingredients.

I'm pretty sure that there is no way to PM other users, here at Hacker News and you don't have an email address in your profile. However if you want have a further discussion on that, feel free to write me an email. You'll find my email address in my Hacker News and Github profile.

Very nice. I particularly like the crawler implementations. I have used scrapy before in a project. I could not guess from the code, but is the all the data going into the database? Could you give some overview details about how things in the backend work. Thanks

Actually the entire backend is on github. But let me explain it for you.

There is as you have already discovered, a crawler implemented with scrapy. However I don't use the scrapy server and pipelines. Instead I have a script that lets scrapy generate JSON files with the crawled recipes and builds the sphinx index from the crawled data. There is no RDBMS. Basically sphinx is my database. :)

Well and than there is the website. Its server-side is implemented with werkzeug and its UI with jQuery.

Oh i actually make scrapy do that to. Do you use the scrapy crawl with -o and -t json options? I did not know spinx can index json files etc. Any reason why sphinx was chosen rather than an alternative? Thanks for the info.

Yes, I use "scrapy crawl <spider> -o <spider>.json" (see bootstrap.sh). Sphinx can not index JSON files directly, but it can index an XML stream written to stdout by a given command. So I have written a script (sphinx/xmlpipe.py), that reads the JSON files generated by scrapy and writes the crawled recipes in sphinx's XML format to stdout.

There are alternatives to Sphinx? ;)

* Sphinx is ridiculous fast, as you can see when searching. But even building the index takes only 340ms (from which 220ms are spend by the python script that generates the XML) for 1699 recipes on my 3 years old notebook.

* Sphinx don't require a RDBMS to index documents from. It can index documents from any source. You just need to write a simple script that brings the documents in the XML format expected by sphinx.

* Sphinx is not only a full text search engine. It is also a multi-value store. You can add extra information like the title and url to indexed documents. And so you don't need an additional database.

* I need the ability to limit a fulltext search to sentence boundaries. I don't know if there are other fulltext search engines that can do that.

I was quite surprised at how fast it was on the searches. It sounds really great and im sure I can put up with xml, I just dont like having to return HTML - but is that you preference and the way you have done it? It looks like its just return dict of results, so no reason why I cant form a json response I guess. How does a typical query look like? and how are you using the sentence boundaries (tbh im sure sure what it even is). I guess for fast text search this is perfect but im guessing any computation it cant do?

For example, if you enter the ingredients "rye whiskey" and "vermouth", following query is generated:

@ingredients (rye SENTENCE whiskey) | vermouth

The SENTENCE operator, basically works like the & operator, just that both operands must occur in the same sentence. That is very helpful, since the index field "ingredients" contains a list of all ingredients of the recipe separated by an "!".

However Sphinx can not only do full text search. You can also filter and sort by attributes and complex expressions, that involve any attribute, the relevance from the fulll-text search, arithmetics and some built-in functions. And Sphinx does that much faster than any RDBMS does. I never managed to generate a sphinx query that took a measurable amount of time, on my 3 years old notebook. ;)

The sphinx index doesn't contain any HTML. However I return HTML, from the WSGI app, that serves the AJAX calls. So I guess that is what you are talking about. It just seemed to me, it would be simpler to generate the HTML for the search results on the server-side with Python than in Javascript.

By the way if you want to use Sphinx for your own project, and you have the data to index already in a MySQL or PostgreSQL database, there is no need to write a script to generate XML. Sphinx can index data from MySQL and PostgreSQL databases directly. However I was just saying that, thanks to xmlpipe support, you don't need an RDBMS just to use Sphinx. And that thanks to index attributes, Sphinx can completely replace an RDBMS in a lot of cases.

Great I think you have me sold :) I want to give this a try since a standard db is what I would normally use to keep the data. This would be an interesting experience. I will be reading up on sphinx and mysql etc, and do any future data scraping straight to sphinx through xmlpipe. Last question :) - Do you have any useful links you can provide on the matter of sphinx etc? Thanks.

http://sphinxsearch.com/docs/2.0.6/

So i have been trying to get the sphinx search working on OSX today - I have indexed the search. I can search stuff in the mysql port using SQL queries but when I search using the test api scripts in php or python or the search command line tool - it always returns empty results. Not sure what is going on.

nvm works perfectly on my vps. I guess my local machine is just a bit messed up. Dam MAMP.

Good stuff.

Back button behavior is pretty annoying :)

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